The FCC postponed a rule that would have banned lead reselling in life insurance. Timothy Schucker explains the delay gives aggregators another year to operate, but agents should shift to generating their own leads via Facebook instead, which convert better and avoid spam-call competition.
If you are a life insurance agent, I've got some massive news for you straight off the printing press. The FCC has just postponed the lead ban, quote unquote, that basically eliminated about 80% of the leads in the life insurance industry. So essentially, if you're not up to date with what was going to happen, basically the FCC was going to ban the lead generator loophole where in order to be contacted by an insurance agent or by anybody, you had to opt in specifically to be contacted by them. So what this was going to do is literally kill aged leads, resold recycled leads. However, this guy right here, I believe this is the lawyer, he just made a flexing on FCC post inside of this little community called TCPaworld. So I've been seeing this over Facebook. This guy is named Eric Troutman and he calls himself the czar of TCPA World. And essentially he, I assume a lot of these big lead aggregators and lead sellers kind of hired this guy to go out and fight this ruling. And it looks like they have pushed it back by another 12 months. So the first time that this ended up coming out and people were talking about it was December of 2023, I believe. So it was supposed to go into effect like January 2024. Then it was going to go into effect August and now it was going to go, and then it was going to go into effect like I think in two, three days. And now it's pushed back a whole other year. So basically what this means is a lot of these, these lead vendors that are selling leads to multiple people, selling them over and over to multiple agents, they're going to continue to operate. So like for example, if you're buying, you know, leads from a CRM or you're buying age leads or whatever, you can still technically buy those leads and call them for at least one other year. So what are my thoughts on this? To be honest with you, I think it's, it's helpful for a lot of lead vendors and for certain agents that relied on that. However, I think overall it's probably a bad thing for consumers. If you take your insurance agent hat off for a second and just think about, you know, life as a regular civilian. Think about how many freaking spam calls you get on a day to day basis, right? Your phone is constantly getting blown up by these, these calls.
What happens is essentially I'll just kind of like whiteboard it out for you guys so you can see if you opt in on like one website, right? This one website then sells your Data to like 55 other people like 55 is just an arbitrary number, but they sell it to a lot of people and then all these people start calling you. So you get all these calls, you opt in one time, but in order to stop getting called, you would have to opt out of like 100 people's call list, which means you're never going to stop getting calls. One of them gets your phone number and it's like you're never gonna hear the end of it. Right? So overall, in my opinion, I think this is probably a bad thing for consumers, but I also think for most agents it's a bad thing too, because if you're calling leads that have opted in to be called by you, but then they're also getting called by all of these other people that are basically just, they're just spam calls. If we're being real, they're getting called by all these spam calls, it makes it harder to reach people, right? So I think overall I would say that this is a negative thing for agents, It's a negative thing for consumers. And yeah, I would say if you are buying these leads, even if you're buying age leads, you're working these age leads.
Even though you can still do it, there's much more effective ways to run this business. And one of those that I personally recommend is even if you don't legally have to still working leads that are opting in one to one to be contacted by you. So something we talk about a lot on this channel is generating your own Facebook leads and then calling those leads because they're opting in to be called specifically by you. I think in my opinion that is a much more effective way to run this business. Whether you run the leads yourself or partner with a marketer. In my opinion that's a much more effective way than then calling age leads. Technically you can still do both for another year. But if you want to make more money as an agent, I think that having one to one leads, and this is what I've consistently seen work better. So one of the best ways to do that is literally just by generating your own leads, right? Or by partnering with someone that can generate those leads for you. And when you do that, when you do that, you're going to get much higher quality leads, you're going to have much higher answer rates and your quality of business is just going to be much stronger. So yes, you can still technically buy these crappy age leads for another year. However, if you're trying to make more money, I would just stop doing it. That's it. Let me know what you guys think in the comments. Do you agree or disagree? And we'll talk soon. See ya.
